Speech acts

One approach to the classification of speech is based on what are called SPEECH ACTS. J. L. Austin in his book, “How to do things with words, ” was the first to really describe what a speech act is and does.

How to Do Things With Words is Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, true or false sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances.

After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:

• First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to " say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
• Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, " unhappy."

The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act:

The most cited example is:

If you say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth, " and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship.

Other examples include:

" I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband, " used in the course of a marriage ceremony,

or

" I bequeath this watch to my brother, " as occurring in a will.

In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.

IN EACH SENTENCE THE WORDS ARE ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING.

HERE IS A MORE OBVIOUS EXAMPLE:

“EVERYONE STAND UP! ”

Now, by saying those words, in the circumstances of a classroom AND a teacher-student relationship, my words actually had the effect of making you stand up.

SPEECH ACTS:

The theory of speech acts aims to do justice to the fact that even though words (phrases, sentences) encode information, people do more things with words than convey information, and that when people do convey information, they often convey more than their words encode.

The words in a SPEECH ACT are called the Utterance. The actions are called the Performance. Almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by the speaker’s intentions. Austin calls these:

PERFORMANCE:

• Locutionary act: This is the act of saying the words.
• Illocutionary act: What one does in saying the words.
• Perlocutionary act: What one does by saying the words, or how the words affect the audience or are intended to affect the audience.

In general speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses desire, and an apology expresses regret.

A speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker’s intentions, the attitude, meaning, and action being expressed. It fails if someone does not understand the whole attitude, meaning, and action of the sentence.

For example:

Let’s say, a bartender utters the words, “Last call! The bar will be closed in five minutes.”

Using Austin’s categories we can say that he is simultaneously:

• Locutionary act: Saying that the bar (the one he tends) will be closed in five minutes (from the time of the utterance).
• Illocutionary act: The bartender is informing the patrons that the bar will close soon and perhaps also the act of urging them to buy one last drink.
• Prelocutionary act: Causing the patrons to believe that the bar is about to close and getting them to want and to order one last drink.

The bartender is performing all these speech acts, at all three levels, just by uttering certain words.

Similarly, pretend you are in a cold room and you say to your friend: “It’s getting cold in here.”

• Locutionary act: you, saying the words “It’s getting cold in here.”
• Illocutionary act: Notifying your friend that the temperature is dropping and that you have noticed it.
• Prelocutionary act: Making the suggestion that someone should close the window.